On November 21, 2023, field intelligence officers within the Department of Homeland Security quietly deleted a trove of Chicago Police Department records. It was not a routine purge.

WIRED has made this article free for all to read because it is primarily based on reporting from Freedom of Information Act requests. Please consider subscribing to support our journalism .

For seven months, the data—records that had been requested on roughly 900 Chicagoland residents—sat on a federal server in violation of a deletion order issued by an intelligence oversight body. A later inquiry found that nearly 800 files had been kept, which a subsequent report said breached rules designed to prevent domestic intelligence operations from targeting legal US residents. The records originated in a privat

See Full Page